


Hunting

by SolWishes



Category: RWBY
Genre: Body Horror, Body Modification, Disarmed, Dismemberment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:00:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27715121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SolWishes/pseuds/SolWishes
Summary: The Hound is given a task.The Hound goes out to fulfill it.The Hound is a good boy.An A/U-esque origin story of sorts for The Hound.
Kudos: 4





	Hunting

**Author's Note:**

> Two people die. Violently.  
> This has been your heads-up.

_A man of silver eyes feels the orbs unceremoniously plucked from their sockets by **her** hands, before he finds himself lifted above what sounds like a bubbling, boiling hell._

_Battered, beaten, and broken, he feels his mind drift away as his body is dropped into a substance not unlike tar._

_He hears the witch taunt him for one last time. "Let us see what happens when someone blessed by the God of Light is dropped into the very pools created by the Brother of Darkness. I so do wonder what will transpire. And maybe, if you just so happen to survive, you can meet dear Ozma again, and tell him everything about how you suffered in these moments."_

_The last sensations he experiences are the thick oily waves clinging to his skin, the drowning as it enters his mouth, his nose, his ears, his eye sockets - each and every pore of skin. He feels innumerable cracks boring through his body, his lungs filling as they burn like mercury. His blindness gives him no vision, but as he succumbs and resigns himself to his fate, all he sees bubbles with black._

_\---_

An indeterminate amount of years later, two lances of white light were what first pierced the veil of its inky hollow in the depths of the pools, a rude awakening for the presence that had slept deep eons within the mire. After a few, painful seconds, the lights ceased.

It heard a voice above the surface, garbled by the gummy veil it lay in.

_"Go on...-mer, he's...-en asleep...quite...-me now. Wa-...up."_

A beat later, the silvery lances resumed.

The warmth of the light threatened to drown its presence beneath a heavenly radiance; all it wanted to do was suffocate the emptiness of the warmth.

It wanted to _hunt down the lights, cease its forsaking luster -_ for the lights only birthed it pain and suffering with an all-encompassing agony - _**why did it hurt, when light was supposed to nurture?!**_

_**KILL THE LIGHT.** _

The lights _burned_ , the lights _seared;_ in response, it adapted.

In an instantaneous, violent reaction, the liquid shadows molded, shifted, and metamorphed its decrepit, rotten, utterly skeletal core into a malleable frame, constructing a cohesive union of flexibility and durability melded with cruel intelligence. The light still burned, much less than before, as it burst forth from the pool of darkness with the body of a quadrupedal predator. Fronted by a lupine maw made from bone and hardened, tarry sinew, empty eye sockets, and black woven ears, the white skull snapped a human head in its jaws, with two teeth finding purchase in two soft eyes. It then brought down a series of relentless bites upon those blasted eyes, continuing through the screams.

When it felt the last of the Aura flit away like mist, the Grimm's large front paws pressed down onto two shoulders, and then crushed the warrior's eyes. The high-pitched, feminine screams pierced the air until it then clamped down onto its victim's head; with a surge of power, the beast snapped one way, hearing neck bones strain, creak, then crack under its mighty fangs, then to the other, tearing clean through muscles, a windpipe, blood vessels and veins, all while its victim tried to push away and punched at it in the most futile manner.

In an act of cruel mercy, the beast bit down even harder and pulled at a sharp angle, cutting off its victim's gargled cries with an awful snap, having severed the spinal cord. In a gradual, agonizingly brutal fashion, the Grimm could hear the ripping of flesh as its victim's head was taken clean off their neck. It dropped its visceral trophy, letting it roll on the ground for a moment. The overwhelming, raw stench of once-flowing blood filled its nose.

"How splendid of you to survive after all these years, and how clever of you, to go for the head of a silver-eyed warrior," said a voice that pierced through its blind world. Feminine, cold, and callous. It felt the beauty that was her blackened heart as she gazed on its blackened, oily form; it preened at her praise of its talent. It cocked its head, keeping an unseeing gaze on its new...lady?...matron?... _queen?_... _yes...all of them, and more - she remembered who it was!_

"You can still understand me?" she asked of it.

A light turn of its head, slightly confused by what was meant by 'still,' and a small, discernible nod, was how it responded.

Titles could do little to express its awe, and so it paid close heed to each and every spoken word. _Serve the Lady, the Matron, the Queen. Empress, and_ _more..._ , it thought to itself, as a flood of words came unexpectedly to its mind.

"How interesting. I see much potential for you. Do you wish to be my personal instrument of precision, then?" A pregnant pause, as she laced her fingers behind her back. "Perhaps I should test you."

The Grimm simply growled in affirmation, and slight anticipation.

"Hunt down this man," she said, as she held out a torn cloth. The Grimm's snout sniffed at it. The scent was of a man with far too much of a vice for tobacco, but it needed more; the scent was still far too vague. It focused, far too intensely, on a much more canine skull shape. The black fibrous tars of its form shifted - at the same time, the bony white of its stout skull cracked and reshaped itself within a painless, torturous matrix of unflinching oily malice. Its empty eye sockets shriveled away, but it cared little, as soon as its olfactive world bloomed into view.

It saw the world not through the cursed light, but through the blessed darkness. In this paradoxically brighter veil of a world lit by smell, every little thing came into view as scents framed the world, with its dimensions solidified by sound.

The air smelled of Dust - of prime quantity, as its scent lay everywhere, and of superb quality, as it sparked off in brilliantly glorious hues based on type and potency.

And there was so much purple shining every which way that it smelled like they were above the world. The low, bellowing echo beneath it confirmed that.

Its oh so wondrous matron smelled of betrayal, pain, and a seething, eternal malice. She smelled of Grimm. _Beautiful._

Once more did it pick up the scent from the torn cloth, and then its world exploded into a wondrous, potent trail ripe for the hunt. The specific brand of cigar - _Monty Cristo_ \- a luxury item from the civilized bastions. A twinge of surprise coursed through it as it remembered something it should not have, that the concept of something so foreign such as a 'company' could be understood by something as primal as Grimm. A flash as still images of cigar smoke fill the air. How odd, for _Monty Cristo_ to still be around; surely, it has been an eternity?

A tinge of leather wafted from the torn cloth in its matron's hand, as her voice brought the Grimm back to its senses.

"The man you seek calls himself Jack Candela. He is one of _his_ followers, and has been a thorn in my side for far too long. Make an example of this vexing man, if you would, my dear... _Hound."_

_A name. A moniker. A title to live by. An **expectation**._

A flash of light passed through its mind - the vestiges of a **gesture of utmost respect -** and immediately did its bones lengthen as its inner viscosity forced its way to the surface. Its roiling consistency forcibly elongating with macabre, liquefied cracks, soon granting it a tall stature within moments. It shifted its balance, and _knelt_ before its queen.

The Grimm matron smelled of brief surprise at the sudden transformation and gesture, before returning to her standard poise. She hummed in satisfaction, witnessing her Grimm's ability to display a human's level of intelligence so readily, so easily.

 _'This will do quite nicely,'_ she thought to herself. "Go forth, and do not return until you bring back proof of a successful hunt," she said, as her Hound's legs reverted back to a quadrupedal state. The Grimm bounded away, hot on the target's trail.

Salem waved at a nearby Seer towards the corpse on the ground. She watched as it entangled the body in its tentacles, and dragged it until it unceremoniously fell beneath the still surface of the shimmering black pool. Salem picked up the head, and threw it like a stone. She internally cheered when it skipped four times, beating her previous record.

\---

Jack Candela adjusted his red leather coat, smoothed out his gray trousers, and propped up his hat, as he walked down the road that would lead him back into Vale. It was a quiet night, but he was confident in his ability to defend himself from an ambush. All he needed to do now was get back to Beacon, report his mission complete, and then go home and surprise his teenage son before he went off to initiation.

But first, the one vice he held onto after so long, smoking, had to be satisfied. He stopped by a lamppost, took out a cigar - because there was no finer brand than _Monty Cristo_ \- and held it in his hand as he went for his lighter. His cane hung off his left arm as he lit the tobacco. He let out a small puff, then sighed as he briefly thought about the day.

A small swarm of Nevermore squawked a fair distance overhead. They headed his direction, and he heeded them in passing, ready to deal with them with relative ease. What he did not expect, however, was the entire swarm of avian Grimm to suddenly change course in mid-flight _away_ from him. He quirked his eyebrow in confusion.

The briefest rustle of a tree, and a sudden whip of the wind were his only warning that something was wrong.

In an instant, a shadow was upon him, taking him by surprise. Jack reacted quickly, augmenting the lighter's flame with a brief application of his Semblance to raise a temporary barrier of fire, but lost his cigar in the split second's madness. He _tsk'ed_ as he hefted his cane in hand, finally catching a glimpse of what exactly attacked him.

A large canine Grimm, shoulders leveled with his own height, its head held forward as a menacing growl poured forth from its large maw. Numerous bone-white protrusions burst out of its back, and aside from the front jaw, its teeth, and some interspersed vertebrae-like plating, the rest of its body was as black as night. Its skin remained in mostly constant motion, churning as if it were adapting endlessly to each and every environmental stimuli.

 _A Grimm that terrifies other Grimm. There is something wrong about that,_ he thought to himself.

"Okay, big boy, I think it's way past time for you to be put down," Jack said, keeping a cautious eye on the large canine Grimm as he briefly twirled his cane in hand. The flaming shield produced by his Semblance then dissipated in flecks of orange.

The Grimm immediately leapt at him like a tiger, a paw reaching out for him. Jack swept the limb aside with a small burst of flame he had condensed into an arm-mounted shield, before smashing his cane straight onto the Grimm's bone mask. The canine beast merely took the hit in stride, hardly seeming bothered by the force of the blow.

_Not like your average Beowulf then, if it could take a hit like that. Most would disintegrate after a smash like that, but this one looked like it took the hit simply because it could._

The Grimm snarled before leaping again, this time with the other paw outstretched. Jack twirled his cane, building up a briefly considerable amount of centrifugal force, then pulled the hidden trigger of his weapon right when the paw met the end of his weapon. A brief flash came forth, followed by an explosion that managed to knock the Grimm back a few paces, as its form briefly became obscured by smoke.

An elastic arm shot out like a ballistic missile without warning, grabbing Jack by the face, before picking him up, briefly slamming him down upon the ground, and then, almost comically, throwing him at the nearby lamppost, his Aura briefly flickering as the force of the impact nearly folded him backwards over the pole. The Grimm's arm soon reverted to its original shape, and the hellish canine stalked out of the smokescreen, slowly approaching the human as he fell onto the ground.

"Well that was certainly a blow to my pride, but at least I can skip my chiropractor appointment now. Sheesh, didn't anybody teach you manners?" he said, slouching forward to nurse his back a moment as he made to stand.

Jack could not help but grow concerned however, once the canine's limbs began to snap and morph, as joints popped out and then refitted themselves. He only grew more nervous as the Grimm _grew_ in height. Its stature slightly hunched over, not unlike a Beowulf's, but twice as menacing, as the forelimbs turned into a proper human-ish arm, tipped with finger-like claws, while its hind legs completely rearranged themselves to accommodate a bipedal stride balanced upon its toes.

"Well that's certainly something you don't see everyday," said Jack, dusting himself off as he made to stand.

The Grimm promptly launched an arm forward. Jack fired back with an explosive Dust round. Using the smoke as a cover, Jack wove around, only to find himself face-to-face with his opponent. The canine jaws lunged for him; he only had enough time to twist at an awkward angle to narrowly avoid the mangling teeth. He could not, however, dodge the claws that wrapped around his waist. He attempted a close-range shot, only for his cane to be swatted out of his hand, clattering to the ground a few feet away.

The beastly Grimm snapped at the man's arm with high pressure, forcing his Aura to spark in a shade of orange.

"Tch, get off me, you mangy stray!" Jack yelled in frustration. He briefly fumbled with his sleeve to procure a lighter. With a magnificent flash of light, Jack ignited his Semblance once more, and the lighter's flame grew to a massive size and whirled around the two, forcing the Grimm to release him and retreat a short distance lest it get burned by the growing blaze.

Jack maintained the blaze as he walked over to pick up his fallen weapon; his Grimm opponent growling all the while. Upon retrieval, Jack fired a brief volley of high-powered rounds, though out of the five he fired, only two managed to hit his target. _Is the damn thing hearing the bullets' trajectory?_ he thought to himself.

When the Grimm leapt at him, he fired another round, then smashed his cane onto the beast's head, just in front of the ear. It had expected something else to occur, so the shock of the blow disoriented the Grimm for a moment - long enough for Jack to bring down a two-handed swing of his cane right onto the beast's temple. When the Grimm fell to the ground from the force of the blow, he brought down one relentless swing after the other.

_Thwack._

_Thwack._

He went for the top of the snout.

_Thwack_

Once more.

_Thwack._

He stopped only after seeing no movement, but he decided to ensure that it was down for good.

"I commend you, sir, for you are definitely one of the toughest cookies in the bunch. Unfortunately, you know what they say about tough cookies, right?" he asked, as he lined up a point-blank shot with his weapon.

"Sometimes you just have to throw them out, because they've gone bad. Ta-ta!" Jack said, as he pulled the trigger.

A growl. Jack fired off a hook that caught the Grimm by its left ear. It put on a sudden burst of speed in an attempt to dislodge itself, but Jack forced the line taut, and pulled the opposite direction.

The Grimm let out a brief yelp of surprise as it felt a sudden tug, then surprised Jack in turn as it grabbed the hook with its hands and _tore_ the offending weapon out of its ear, letting out a brief grunt as a chunk of its ear flap came with it. It snarled as it brought its arms down in front of it and took a stance, then went for a blow that appeared oddly too well-aimed.

A vicious melee soon broke out between the two as the canine Grimm went in for blood. Every so often, it utilized its forelimbs as whips to disorient and whittle down the man's focus, all while it attempted to anchor him down with its bony maw. Jack's reflexes and combat prowess went into overdrive as he strove to hold off the unnerving swarm of irregularly angled blows and punches that seemed just a tad bit too intelligent for something like a Grimm to know. Try as he might, Jack only managed to put in a couple glancing blows due to the swirling limbs and the Grimm's sheer cunning.

 _A Grimm shouldn't have this kind of intelligence! What is going on here?_ he thought to himself. The beast was fast, disturbingly durable, and remarkably cunning. Surely it would stand to reason that Ozpin's enemies would be the ones to have the knowledge to craft something as deadly as this. He broke off the melee with a clever use of a disengage, then jumped well over his mysterious opponent. He had to make it back and warn the staff at Beacon-

A fizzling sound, a wave of orange, and then a feeling of stark nakedness permeated through him, as the Grimm's arm grabbed his left foot. He felt a brief sensation of weightlessness, and then a _whoosh_ , as he was ungracefully brought down to the ground.

His body formed a crater when he landed, debris and dust going every which way after the impact. Jack could barely hear its heavy footsteps over the sound of his heartbeat pounding in his ears. He tried to crawl away, only for the beast to heft his entire weight solely by his left arm.

The Grimm brought Jack to eye level, and that was when the man realized why all of his tricks did not work.

And then his world flashed red, when it pulled, and pulled, and pulled, bringing his Aura to flare and flicker each time.

After several agonizing seconds, his Aura cracked, and soon dissipated like embers off a cigarette. Then -

_An indescribable wave of pain, nerves alit in fire -_

The Hound stamped its foot down onto Jack's chest, then held his left arm in its hands and mercilessly _pulled._ His shoulder first popped in relief, then popped out of its socket, and then Jack screamed as the Grimm tore off his left arm with a tad too much ease, with skin, flesh, and muscle coming apart as if he was mere paper. As he began to bleed out, Jack was soon met with unconsciousness when the Grimm stamped on his head with far too much control.

The Hound's form went into a frenzied flux as its back ruptured open in a shower of branched, black ichor, with a red, translucent film, patterned similarly to a grotesque dragonfly's wings. After a moment to ensure a clear scene, it flew off into the skies outside of Vale's proper, Jack's arm in hand, and leaving the dapperly dressed man to bleed out, on a quiet, calm night just outside Vale's gates.

 _I'm so sorry, Roman,_ he thought to himself in the darkness of his mind.

\---

"You have met and exceeded my every expectation, my dear Hound. You have done exactly as I asked, and even better, _left behind a warning_ for dear Ozma. You, as a Grimm, have done what other _humans_ could not," said Salem.

The Hound felt high praise within those words, a blessing from its matron. It growled in contentment.

_But it desired to do more than growl. It wished to directly affirm its beautiful matron's faith in it, that it was worthy of being a Grimm that even the Brother of Darkness could take pride in._

It listened intently, hyper-focusing on the sounds, of _how_ such sounds were produced. It heard a light wind pass through the neck of its matron, and glide over two little internal bands in a small, hollow chamber in her throat.

It had remembered feeling a similar sensation whenever it exhaled, yet all it had let out were mere growls, yelps, and snarls. The sensation of _vocal cords_ felt vaguely ever familiar... _What if it crafted its_ _own?_

The Hound accepted its own challenge.

First, it shifted its frame from four legs. The ever-companionable crackling and molding of its form under its tar-black, roiling hide. Its internal structure shattered, reconstructed itself to shift from four legs to two hind legs, as it felt itself bend, creak, boil, underneath as it shifted its very anatomy to follow its bidding.

Then, after standing on two legs, it began to transfigure the internal anatomy of its neck, manipulating its oiled, rippling structure to create two small bands that stretched across its larynx.

A few more moments passed as it solidified these strange structures, which inexplicably fit so perfectly within itself. _Almost like something were previously there,_ an inner voice betrayed.

The Hound let out small, short vocalizations, brief utterances and attempts at a cohesive facsimile of a word, as it _kneeled_ in front of Salem.

" **A-ah...** ," it began, with a crack, as it allowed air to flow over its newly formed vocal structures. Salem cocked an eyebrow, quite intrigued by the development.

" **Ah -** **I...I...a-am...** ," it continued, undaunted, its control over _sound_ , over _speech_ , slowly coming to the forefront. The Grimm's memory flashed back to when its beautiful matron spoke simultaneously with a calm fury, and a seething malice. It sought for the same. It mentally studied the movement of lips, the tongue, even _tone,_ the current of air. It delved further still, into the ancient memories, as it recalled such things as vocabulary and syntax.

 **"I am...Hound...your Hound...Matron. I- I am...your will,"** it said, with a haunted husky tone akin to a cursed wind. **"All I...ask...allow me...to...stay...allow me...a chance to confirm...your faith...in...me."**

A slightly more potent scent of surprise came from its Queen, but only for a moment. It heard the slight creaks of her face, as she smiled.

"Yes, I believe you will do quite nicely, my dear Hound. Welcome to your new home," she said with a gentle smile, patting the top of its head.

A sudden wave of...strangeness washed over it. An odd sense of elation, an absolute contradiction to its very being, as it lowered its ears in contentment.

_Ah...gratitude._

**"I...accept your...kindness, my...Queen."**

**Author's Note:**

> Clips on the Hound were the first thing I've seen of RWBY since vol. 5 aired, so forgive me. Or sue me, for this posting of an absolutely crack theory, that works too.
> 
> Comments/constructive criticism is always welcome.


End file.
